Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday February 17, 2014 @10:38AM
from the lets-have-a-look dept.

dotarray writes "If a recent report is to be believed, Valve is looking at your browsing history. Reportedly, the company's Valve Anti Cheat system (VAC) looks at all the domains you have visited, and if it finds that you've frequented hack sites, you'll be banned. 'The new functionality has been slammed by gamers, who claim it is "more like spyware than anti-cheat". Valve has not responded to the allegations, but all Steam users have agreed to abide by specific online conduct and not to use cheats. The company's privacy policy also explains that Valve may collect "personally identifiable information", but promises not to share it with other parties.'"

From TFA, they send themselves MD5 hash of the websites people have visited. Knowing that, I believe that they are using your DNS history signature to compare between players that are cheating. I don't see why they would ban people they aren't sure are cheating, as they certainly don't want to be hit by PR nightmare when people would get banned for no reason. The rare false positive they get at this time is already hard on them, and they go great way (well, large amount of steam credits happen) to make thos

You're assuming the MD5 hashes are used as part of anti-cheat detection, not just because Valve want to know which porn you enjoy.You're assuming that MD5 clash rates are materially significant.You're assuming that accessing a cheat site is deemed cheating and leads to a ban.You're assuming that bans are based on single data points.You're assuming that VAC automagically determines you're a cheat and that there isn't a human review involved.

He is talking about running a web browser in the VM so that you can browse cheat web sites to your heart's content without Valve or anyone else having a clue that you are doing it. Next time engage brain first:-)

Browsing the internet only from a VM is actually the most secure way to do so whether or not you're running Steam. With a VM, you can do some browsing, click on all the most depraved and unsavoury sites and then close it down and revert to a snapshot.

We shouldn't have to worry about hiding our browser history from a fucking game company. They have no god damn business even taking a peak. I don't care if if there is a hidden clause in their Eula that they say allows it. It's wrong, and they know it's wrong.

While I agree with you - we find ourselves in a world where our government and our corporations have ASSumed the authority to spy on us. I suggest you deal with reality as it is. Let's all learn to hide our history from the likes of Steam, along with Google and all the other trackers out there.

Run Steam on your real high-tech hardware - and keep everything else on a different machine, or in a virtual machine. Just separate the two, and you're good to go.

This is so wrong and against privacy laws (at least in the EU), this would be equal to the IRS regularly scanning your history to see if you visit sites with tips for tax dodging. The police arresting everyone who visits lockpicking tutorials. The RIAA arresting everyone for possession of an internet account, Or the TSA l.. oh wait, they already do that. But at least the TSA can claim that their work is in the public interest.

Besides. This is a new definition of guilty by association.

" all Steam users have agreed to abide by specific online conduct"

I would say this is only valid while using a Steam product. the way it is worded in TFA sounds more like a lifestyle where you have to abide to their rules at all times. Steam makes it even illegal to cheat in games from their competitors!

This is so ridiculous, all I can do is wait for the class action lawsuit to commence. Steam is done with, if this turns out to be true.

How do one set up rules to block Steam from accessing firefox profiles? (Linux obviously, though guide for Windows is fine too. Also Chrome.)

The only useful workaround is to boycott steam. Otherwise they will work around your workarounds till they finally just install a Sony rootkit. Do you really want a company that even takes even one step over the line? teach them a lesson.

flush the dns cache before you launch steam:on a mac that command is:sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

However since steam is normally installed with admin permissions it may very well be running some sort of spyware deamon that is violating your privacy even when the application is not running, making that dodge useless. Since they are willing to go that far I would not put it past them to also be running a spyware daemon as well.

No on Debian, I run steam as a normal user under user credentials. It doesn't launch any daemons, and has no suid executables, but it does have read/write access to all local files which includes saved history of browsers. Will do strace when I get home. Should be interesting.

Players who are frustrated by cheaters are also ready to boycott Steam. If I were Steam, I would serve my frustrated, honest users. We also maintain a gaming site, and you cannot believe how many people get angry because of cheaters.

I have no issue if they only check for domains or only selectively download the list. But I use three different machines for gaming, development, and system administration.

Still pretty fucking invasive if true. I'm going to have to watch this and, if true, protest. Not quite sure how yet, I'd hate to lose my game library but this sort of invasive behavior can't go unanswered. The "repeatedly redownload your gaming library" idea has some merit if done en-masse along with vocal enough complaints. Perhaps we can dig up the phone number and address of the company executives so we can send our complaints directly to the parties responsible for allowing such a thing .

I agree that it's very invasive if the list is returned to Valve, however I can't find any evidence that it is. The code originally posted only details the *reading* and hashing of the DNS cache, with no sign of *transmitting* it.

As far as I can see, numerous headlines and articles since the code was posted have made the claim that the list is sent to Valve, without any evidence.

Look, when I was a kid, I used to play Counterstrike pretty seriously. I was curious about these cheats that I kept seeing on VAC-secure servers, so I went and found some and played around with them - on VAC-insecure servers, of course*. They're really cool bits of code that hook into the game and understand the engine well enough to find the head "bone" and wait for it to come into the player's view. Being a coder, I wanted to know how they worked - not to write my own, but software that

It's not like Windows where you basically are expected to run everything as one user, create a Steam user which you can only "su" to from certain other users, and then set up a script to automatically make it run Steam only as a user that has access to nothing but Steam.

But to be honest what's the point? What precisely are they going to do with the hash of a domain name that you looked up, not even visited? The bans are not going to be based on that information. You can't ban someone just because they strayed or were enticed into looking up a domain that might host a cheat, only if they actually use those cheats.

I reckon they are using it to find similar users and spot trends more than anything else. If a load of confirmed cheaters all have the same hash in their history, but not most people, then its likely that it's worth looking into other user's with that same hash (or at least taking it into account when someone reports a new cheat).

I'm a Steam fan, it has to be said, but while them looking at my domain history concerns me, they are at least hashing them and they have a full browser in the Steam client. If they want to track my visits, that's infinitely more worrying and does all sorts of cookie stuff (alright, you have to be running Steam and using their browser to visit whatever, but that's still much more info than the hash of a domain I looked up).

Also, in case you hadn't noticed, the name of domains you looked up all go to your DNS server. If that's not a local one, you're already pushing this information in plain text across the Internet. Please tell me that you're not using Google or OpenDNS before you came to whine on this post.

Plus, even aside from all the above, there is no real evidence that they are actually transmitting or collecting this information. Someone's just gone into the new anti-cheat modules with a disassembler and seen something suspicious. Doesn't mean that it's even enabled, or not test code. Nobody has yet seen it actually do this stuff (and what would it take? Wireshark and five minutes?).

If you're using DNSSEC exclusively, didn't read the Steam agreement, are running as a completely unprivileged user (without even access to the name cache, on Linux, presumably?), and can confirm that what is alleged is actually happening, then maybe you have a case to be miffed.

You should be more careful about making statements about things you know little about.I run and administer several proxy servers, and have even written my own; I think I know how they work.

When you have a proxy server configured in the web browser, instead of looking up the IP address of the web site, and then connecting to that IP, the browser will look up the IP address of the proxy server, and send the request including the full URL to the proxy.The proxy server does the lookup of the address of the dest

Steam isn't a subscription service, you pay full price (ok or wait for sales) for games and they can only be run through Steam. So uninstalling Steam means losing access to the games you've bought through the service unless you pirate them back. This does make me want to delete Steam and cease using the service though.

I wonder if there are enough irritated users to delete and redownload their entire Steam library enough times to send Valve a high-bandwidth wake-up protest message.

So you buy games that you can't play unless you have steam? Why would you do that? I play all my games without permission from anyone. I bought them, they belong to me and I play them when I want without some service watching over me. What is wrong with people today... why do you put up with this kind of crap?

I license the right to play a game from Steam, usually for dirt cheap prices, and in exchange, it's available on any Internet-connected computer I own. Should I lack an Internet connection, it's possible to enable an offline mode as well, allowing me to continue playing regardless of my lack of a connection.

Games haven't been owned by anyone for a long time now. Even buying a physical disc is just buying a license to play the game, which can and does get revoked in cases of abuse (see: Halo 4 [xbox.com], Call of Duty: Ghosts [slashgear.com], Diablo III [battle.net]). Of the companies out there that are licensing games to customers, Steam is relatively permissive, and it's rare that a typical gamer will run into issues with them.

*) Possibility to cancel your business relationship with Valve and keep playing the games you paid for.

That same complaint applies just as well to physical copies of games as it does virtual ones, and is really a complaint about the licensing model used in the software industry, rather than being a complaint about DRM.

When you purchase a game disc at your local retailer, you're merely purchasing a license to play the game. That's the nature of your business relationship with Ubisoft, EA, or whoever. As such, canceling your business relationship with them would mean rescinding your licenses. For a physical ga

No, you don't (unless you're representing a game publisher or developer, in which case maybe you do). Read the fine print included with any game you buy today on physical media. You bought the disc, so you generally have the right to resell the disc, and the licenses are transferable as well, so it gives many consumers the illusion of ownership, but the fact is, you don't own any of the games that you've "bought". That's why companies are legally capable of cutting off customers who break rules in their games. I provided links to several examples a few posts back in this thread.

I'm not suggesting I like that it's this way, mind you, nor that it should be this way. I'm merely pointing out that it's the reality of the situation. Having you deny it doesn't magically make it untrue.

A EULA is not a contract because it lacks the required elements of a contract, and it is not a license either, because it grants NO license! Instead, it purports to impose an anti-license, that is to impose draconian limits far above and beyond what copyright law provides, unilaterally. There is no legal principle to support this, other than 'who has the gold makes the rules.'

Go look up contracts of adhesion [wikipedia.org]. IANAL, but this is basic stuff that anyone on Slashdot should know since it's of vital importance to the software industry and has been repeatedly upheld by the courts. Ignorance of them is no reason to stick your fingers in your ears and act as if they don't exist.

If you want to make an argument that their terms are unconscionable, that's one thing, but you're arguing that the contracts simply don't exist. I'll agree that there may not be an ethical basis for what they're

The reason I *started* using Steam was because I bought a game in a store only to find when I got it home that it was pretty much a dummy disk that just made me install Steam and download the game in order to play it. The game was Civilization V. I don't get outraged by much, but come to think of it, that kind of is an outrage, but one just borderline enough that I was willing to accept it rather than not play the game. I don't/didn't know what else to do.

Steam and their competitors make it easy to buy, download and play games. Even if you don't want Steam you have few options: buy the actual game on CD or DVD (and have it loaded with buggy malware-like copy prevention and needing the CD/DVD when you want to play) or a publishers distribution platform which works just like Steam. Downloading the game makes so much more sense in the internet age and I would never go back to buying physical media copies.

If you buy a AAA retail game (that originally sold for $60) for $5, you've gotta know that there are going to be some strings attached. If you're willing to deal with those strings, well, you just saved yourself a bunch of money.

There are other benefits. I've never once had to deal with scratched or lost disks, backwards compatibility or multiple system.

Of course there are negatives as well... and whether or not it balances out, up to each person to dec

Not always...
It is my understanding that many games simply use Steam as a handy distrubution mechanism. There is nothing to say they must incorporate DRM. I'm pretty sure The Binding of Isaac is a good example...

They also offer a variety of services which I greatly appreciate in this day an age.

I don't have to lug around all my cds/dvds/Floppies every time I move and honestly I've gotten rid of all my physical media (external hard-drives excluded) about 2 international moves ago.

It automatically keeps all my games up to date, no more Battlefield 1942 patch hell.

As a store front it allows me to keep up to date on game releases and even pre-load certain titles.

Steam sales.

A robust offline mode which automatically works as long as you've downloaded the game and run it a single time while being connected online.

I use it as a unified launcher.

I use it as a communication tool dedicated to getting in touch with other people I know who are playing games and can easily organize matches of any game on our collective steam lists.

Also not all games come with the steamworks DRM and can be run freely without steam even being installed on the system. Granted you have to download it through Steam first, but that would apply to any digital store front. Not to mention I've never noticed the DRM in action, making it the most non-intrusive form so far and if it doesn't even bother me, I don't see much reason to rage about it if it means that Steam is more likely to stay in business.

I no longer have to input CD-keys or even worry about where I've physically kept the myriads of manuals containing them and installing software is as quick as simply wanting to play something and double clicking the title and download/installation is automatic. I don't have as much time to waste on gaming as I used to so streamlining it is in my best interest.

Having to live with the "fear" that one day my games will be gone is like worrying that a Jumbo jet will land on my house. Honestly, I'd just pirate the games I'd lost.

*and there was no advance notice?*and you had no way of backing up all these old games?*and all your computers stop working the day before the shut down?*and video games become illegal?*and we reach the heat death of the universe?

Worth noting that VAC doesn't lock you out of running games or delete your account, it just prevents you from playing multiplayer on VAC servers. VAC is a voluntary-to-publisher service that Valve offers to creators of multiplayer games. If a publisher says "yeah, if someone cheats on a different game then we don't want them playing on our servers either", they can do that...it's pretty much the same as publicly shared email blackhole lists. If you have a problem with a publisher putting VAC in their games, complain about them and not Valve.

Many (most?) multiplayer games that let players run their own servers give an option of running a non-VAC one, or to connect directly to IP, whatever.

Seriously...even if Valve didn't run VAC, someone else would run an equivalent service (can you say Punkbuster?). All it takes is for one or two companies to say "hey we have this way to detect cheaters, why don't we share the steam keys of the cheaters we find and keep them from playing online on our servers", and there you go.

I have far more important things to worry about in life than some games. If Valve craters, there will be a new outlet for games (maybe we'll get lucky and there's be a move to GoG). As long as the risk-adjusted price I pay is fine, I don't see the problem.

As with everything in life, you pays your money and you takes your chances. The chances that Valve will vanish in the next few months, while I'm still heavily playing whatever game I just bought, are quite small.

A lot of games, including multiplayer games, can be run without simultaneously running steam. You have to launch the applications directly from the steam library directory, but steam doesn't need to be running.

Security researchers? Most game server admins I know (at least, the good ones) will browse hack sites/videos, so they know what's out there and what to look for. Unless it started very recently, they're not doing any banning for this.

Actually, the article doesn't say anyone has been banned using the data. It specifically says that NO one currently knows what happens with the data. So that's a pretty large red herring. That doesn't negate the heinousness of them tracking the websites you visit *just* in case you might cheat. Very NSA-esque.

That doesn't negate the heinousness of them tracking the websites you visit *just* in case you might cheat.

They aren't tracking websites you visit. They are tracking your DNS-requests. They are not the same thing, DNS-requests only show what domain names your system has queried and doesn't even say if the queries have come from the browser, IM, games or anything else -- there is no way for Valve to deduce the websites you've been visiting from these if there's more than one site behind the domain, like e.g. many blogging platforms and such host thousands of blogs under a single domain-name.

Luckily, not everyone lives in the US.Some countries have different laws, even consumer protection laws that are worth that name.

And yes, even companies operating out of the US have to conform to at least some of these laws if they want to do business in Germany/Europe. An yes, they WANT to, because Europe is not an insignificant market.

I'm not so sure.1. Are you sure the EULA actually states that they may monitor your non-steam related activities? I would appreciate a pointer to the relevant paragraph if so.2. My understanding is that it's still somewhat up in the air exactly how legally binding an EULA really is. Though I doubt most people could afford a good enough lawyers to press the issue3. Even assuming the EULA is binding, it's generally accepted that a contract cannot demand that either party surrender their constitutional ri

> Indeed, it also says the the actual entries themselves are not sent back, but only the hashes

DNS names are easily enumeratable, the only reason to emphasize that it's hashes is if you're clueless or dishonest.From a privacy perspective, they are sending back DNS names, saying that's hashes is only fooling people.

DNS names are easily enumeratable, the only reason to emphasize that it's hashes is if you're clueless or dishonest.From a privacy perspective, they are sending back DNS names, saying that's hashes is only fooling people.

Oh? If they're really easily enumerable, pray tell, which DNS name does the following hash point to?c0ff3e297157c1e60bc2a2bedb5f6532

Oh? If they're really easily enumerable, pray tell, which DNS name does the following hash point to?
c0ff3e297157c1e60bc2a2bedb5f6532

I have no idea, but even you must be able to see that it would be trivial to put together a lookup table of the top million or so domain names indexed on their corresponding hashes. From that you can easily work out the domain name from the hash, without actually reversing the hash function.

Happily enough, Alexa offers a download of the top million domains [amazonaws.com]. Even calculating the MD5 hash for every domain every time and doing a simple string comparison using node.js [nodejs.org], it takes only a couple of seconds to run through every single entry in that table.

arth1's domain isn't in the top million list, though.

But still, there are plenty of sites in the top million list you may not want to share with Valve that you visit, like #83, pornhub.com, or #84, huffingtonpost.com.

What he means is that there are rainbow tables available for many MD5 hashes. There is software that can search hundreds of thousands of possible hashes per second. You don't need to calculate the MD5 hash over, you just have to do a simple text compare, followed by a lookup in the rainbow table.
If you have a rainbow table of the major hack sites in which you're interested, I bet it doesn't take more than a second or two to determine if the hash you sent is of one of those sites.
Maybe that doesn't fit y

I've been trying to switch my gaming purchases to GoG anyway, mainly because it's a pain to game on both a laptop and desktop with Steam. This is just another reason for it.All GoG needs is to start supporting Linux...

I've been evaluating various Linux distros for my desktop, as my hobby time is more and more Linux (hello, Raspberry Pi and robotics!). I looked at Wine, and learned about CodeWeaver's CrossOver (this is probably old news to you). Once I had appropriate 3D drivers installed for my Toshiba S955 (that was a battle), I was able to install some stuff from GOG. Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault, for example, ran flaw

I've known gamers to frequent cheat sites just to see what the cheaters are using and what is possible to exploit When a legitimate player suddenly faces inexplicable challenges sometimes they go find where people are downloading their skills/advantages from in order to explain their new struggles. Often times it starts with the feeling "that HAS to be a cheat" then digging around finding if there is a cheat the enables that behavior.

I imagine that they'll get the same experience as somebody who runs a Tor relay-only node. Admins will block them because it is easy to do, and has a minimal impact on their sales. They really don't care if it has no impact on security.

For values of "debunked" equal to "people clueless about how VAC works are loudly insisting that it's not true, and being believed because Valve fanbois". (Amongst other issues, you won't find the code of any VAC modules in Steam's or the game's DLLs because they're downloaded from the server at runtime in order to make them harder to reverse-engineer and block.) Someone later in the thread has apparently tested and found that stuffing the DNS cache with bogus entries increases the amount of SSL-encrypted d [reddit.com]

I thought the point of playing a game was to relieve stress. Getting online to play something is starting to become more involved and complex than most people's jobs. It is kind of a shame, though, that people take Counterstrike and Call of Duty so seriously that they need to scam the system. Defeats the purpose, no?

... unless an employee decides to use it, a secret order of the NSA requires to disclose it, their servers get hacked (by the NSA, other countries intelligence agencies, hacking groups, or script kiddies) or the protocol have a vulnerability or the information can be captured and decrypted. The respect of privacy by US companies had become an oximoron. Is a promise that they can't possibly honor, and they are too big to close doors like Lavabit if the NSA want their customers data.

I have a non-addictive personality in general... perhaps it would be more accurate to say "anti-addictive" as there have been times when I would go overboard with some activities. X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, for example, cost me hundreds of dollars in "sick days" after calling in to work because I wanted to accomplish something. (Sick and stupid right?) I came to my senses after a paycheck demonstrated the value of my lost time. Anyway, I don't really play games which are time consuming and/or deeply involvi

Also, not to apologize for Valve, but there are games far more invasive than this. Some NFS games (NFS:S2U for one) will trawl your actual browser history to put targeted ads on in-game advertising surfaces. Unless you use a software firewall to block their Internet access;-)

Basically, they're looking only for the DRM servers used by some very specific kernel-level cheats (apparently even cheats have DRM now - and these are not web sites, but DRM servers they're looking for, you won't trigger it by searching for or even buying cheats unless you use them). They do this comparison client-side, transmitting only if there is a match, and only transmitting the hashed value (which is used so the VAC servers can confirm it was a cheat when issuing the ban - otherwise one would be able to forge a "cheat" and get someone else banned). They also only do this scan at all if VAC has detected the cheat in the first place, which they claim has affected less than 0.1% of their users.

Valve is explicitly denying that they are gathering your browser history.

So my overall analysis:1) If what they say is true, then they're doing everything they can to *not* gather your browsing history, and are only gathering the hashed value to protect users.2) This should be possible to verify - see if the code doing the checks is triggered at all during normal use, and see what a packet sniffer picks up.3) Even though I like Valve a lot, after recent events (Snowden, some personal betrayals, etc.) I feel I can't trust anybody. I'll let others do the verification (I'm not technically skilled enough to trust my own work on it), but if it turns out that this is all they are doing, it's a good thing that is very, very close to being a bad thing. If, however, they are not just spying on us but then lying about it, I will be downloading a Steam crack immediately (I spent over $1000 on Steam games, they're mine no matter what the law says) and taking everything into offline mode.

This might be a way to bully/troll someone. Find what their account name is, then make an account with the identical name on every botting site. Of course, account names are hard to come by, but it is a way for someone to cause mischief, similar to people who create bogus FB profiles.

>My point being that dns histroy is only the grossest of measures of what you're doing on your pc

Don't worry, it's still enough to let the NSA send you to Guantanamo indefinitely if you do anything else suspicious, or if someone doesn't like you. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before such privileges extend to their secret corporate sponsors as well. And for those kinds of privileges who *wouldn't* sponsor them?

WHY HELLO, MY FELLOW LOYAL, SLASHDOT-READING COMRADE. LET US TALK OF DNS CACHES AND GAME SUBSCRIPTIONS AND VALVE AND STUFF.

[whisper] Would you shut up? You're gonna get us killed. All the first wave of revolutionaries have already been lined up against the wall and shot. Keep it under the radar. Now see if you can sneak over to the Facebook love analysis article, and another resistance operative will brief you there.[/whisper]

Perhaps its time to put certain applications, such as web browsers in their own "VM appliance" to isolate them from being spied on or misused by other apps.\In this case that would have no effect - the DNS cache is (indirectly) accessed by every 'net enabled application on you computer.

Or perhaps it's time to start implement finer-grained permissions for all applications, such as the security system OLPC was experimenting with. There's no reason anything in my game library should be able to look at anythin